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Welcome to Northeastern University’s science and research blog. We call it iNSolution because that’s what our faculty and student researchers are in the business of—finding solutions to societal problems while simultaneously contributing to the fundamental knowledge base of their respective fields.

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Lois Gibbs is “mad as hell”…

…and she’s trying to get North­eastern stu­dents mad too. Because maybe if people are mad enough, she said, they’ll start making changes. Gibbs, a nation­ally renowned envi­ron­mental activist and exec­u­tive director of the Center for Health, Envi­ron­ment and Jus­tice, spoke at last night’s meeting of the Husky Envi­ron­mental Action Team (HEAT).

Gibbs recounted the hor­ri­fying tale of watching her chil­dren and those of her neigh­bors suffer from dis­eases like leukemia and a 56% birth defect rate as a result of living in the vicinity of a 20K ton toxic chem­ical dump. When she went to her school board, and even­tu­ally the gov­ernor, demanding a res­o­lu­tion, they told her there was nothing they could do.

That was 1978. Two years ear­lier a study of the Love Canal neigh­bor­hood of Niagra Falls showed that 200 dif­ferent toxic chem­i­cals were present in the air at levels well above those declared healthy for a 160lb male over a 40-​​hour week (the work­place standard).

By 1982, after an inter­na­tion­ally rec­og­nized activist move­ment led by Gibbs, the Love Canal neigh­bor­hood was almost com­pletely aban­doned. As far as I can tell, the fam­i­lies that suf­fered received some amount of com­pen­sa­tion but it was not without sig­nif­i­cant effort.

So, how does all of this relate to today’s world? Gibbs said that even though we have 30 years of sci­ence behind us, not much has changed. She insisted that sci­ence will not be the solu­tion on its own — plenty of research has pro­vided pretty solid evi­dence of cli­mate change and the impact of green­house gases. But still poli­cies remain in place that don’t make much sense for fam­i­lies like those in Love Canal.

She talked about fracking — the extrac­tion method that mines nat­ural gas from shale rock beneath many Amer­ican towns and makes tap water flam­mable. Some argue that there is no valid sci­en­tific evi­dence linking the weird phe­nomena in fracking towns to the practice.

I don’t yet know what I think about fracking, myself, I haven’t learned too much about it. The guy sit­ting next to me yes­terday said to check out a video called Gasland to learn more.

I do know that we are at a point in our global intel­lec­tual devel­op­ment that makes some envi­ron­mental prac­tices irre­spon­sible. This is why Gibbs said it’s a polit­ical fight, not a sci­ence fight or a social jus­tice fight. No matter how much evi­dence you put in front of a person, she said, it’s some­times not enough to con­vince him that some­thing needs to change.

Gibbs encour­aged stu­dents to get involved on the local level. She said that HEAT was a great way to start and she com­mended the recent suc­cess of two Stu­dent Gov­ern­ment ini­tia­tives that will require a 1:1 recy­cling to trash ratio by 2014 and the addi­tion of an auto­matic con­tri­bu­tion to the renew­able energy fund to every student’s annual bill.

Gibbs and her neigh­bors pick­eted every “thou­sand dollar plate dinner” held by the gov­ernor of New York in 1978 until he real­ized he had to talk about the problem so that his sup­porters would not pull out. This is the inten­sity she’d like to see as we take on today’s envi­ron­mental challenges.

About the Writer

Angela Herring is the science writer for the Northeastern news team. In a past life, she made fullerenes (aka bucky balls) at a small chemical company outside of Boston while freelance writing for the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, the Broad Institute and Novartis Biomedical Research Institutes. She earned her Bachelor's degree in chemistry and literature from Bennington College in 2005. In addition to writing stories for the News@Northeastern, she also maintains the university's research blog: iNSolution.

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